>> building a better bay getting answers on abc seven. every day we talk with experts about issues important to the bay area and we get answers for you in real time. today we explore the cultural connection to recovery for the people of hawaii

studies professor about that and hawaii's love-hate relationship with tourism and new pleas for tourists to stay away. also, is what you are breathing bad for your brain? air pollution could impair brain functions. the author of the study will join us to explain the risk. first, new developments in the accident that killed a four-year-old girl in san francisco and severely injured her father yesterday. the girl was is in a stroller when an suv crushed her. police have arrested the driver for three counts of not yielding to pedestrians. and one count of vehicular manslaughter. joining us live now is francisco spokesperson to discuss street safety issues in the wake of this tragedy. thanks for joining us. marta: i'm sad to be

because of what has happened on our streets. kristen: understood, and we are also very sad. another fidelity. put this in context for us. how many fatalities have there been in san francisco streets this year? marta: this is the 11th pedestrian so far this year. every year about 30 people are killed in crashes on san francisco streets and about half of those are pedestrians. kristen: can we talk about for pedestrians, what results in their death? isn't usually the result of a speeding car. in this case it was not speeding, it was not yielding. but explain to us the circumstances you are seeing. marta: all you have to do is take a walk in san francisco and you can feel how dangerous it is. every day an average of three people are hit while walking in san francisco. vehicles are larger, heavier, faster than they have ever been,

more powerful. and drivers are driving more aggressively, they are more distracted, they are driving faster. this is an incredibly dangerous combination especially when you look at an intersection like fourth and king, where this happened. this is like too many streets in our city which are incredibly wide and encourages drivers to go faster. two lanes of turning traffic were part of this crash. the right turn was what hit this family, the right turning driver. it's just, being designed to protect us and this intersection was so many people using it all the time, you have the train and everything, and it is just not for people. it is for moving traffic fast and it is not right. kristen: police have not

revealed the exact circumstances but if you are on fourth and making that right onto king there are two lanes to turn right. i have been in that left one before thinking it is harder to see pedestrians as you are making that turn in that corner. so, are there things with regard to safety in designing safer streets for pedestrians and bicyclists that are being pushed for? marta: absolutely. you look at streets and intersections like this and they are just too wide. pedestrians have a very far distance to go, increasing their risk. drivers will drive more aggressively and faster. here at this intersection, drivers are hurrying to get onto the freeway and not making the best decisions because of that. the biggest thing is to bring down the width of the street and elaine's. -- and the lanes. you can have concrete that comes out that slows turning drivers.

you can put things in intersections to force drivers to have to pay attention, slowdown, and keep an eye out to all of these precious, vulnerable human bodies on our streets. it's just so dangerous and it should not be and it does not have to be like this. kristen: some of the things you cited, in particular making the streets narrower, i remember at one point the car lobby had something to do with us building wide streets and not carving out artistry for bike lanes but instead making the whole thing available to cars with bicyclists riding along beside. i know there have been some changes. can you cite any that has worked and reduced injuries? marta: yeah, and i want to give credit to san francisco for starting to shift how streets are designed. you can think of a street even like masonic which people have been killed on bicycles there.

it now has a much more narrow field. there's a median with trees and it, and you will naturally go slower there. there's also bike lanes. again, it creates a different feel for the drivers and that benefits all of us for safety, including drivers. this is about all of us getting around. a city like ours is so dense and so many people are walking. safety should be prioritized not just by moving cars fast. that his 1950's thinking. we have to get rid of that and shift to a different way or this is going to get worse. kristen: have we looked at the numbers over time to see if they are getting worse in terms of injuries and fatalities? i know the pandemic years were kind of an anomaly in terms of numbers. marta: y nationallyeah, -- yeah, nationally we are at the highest number of pedestrian deaths in 40 years and we are in a crisis.

this is finally filling awareness and support for designing and enforcing our streets to protect people. but it is going us saying we do not accept what happened yesterday. i just want to take a moment to acknowledge the suffering this poor family is going through. thinking of them and so many people especially parents like myself are holding them and our thoughts. today is the first day of school here in san francisco and we are taking arcades to school and these poor people just lost their child. just wanted to say that. kristen: an out-of-town family, four-year-old, the father still critical. it is just a horrible situation. before we go i want to ask you, we have a vision zero plan to get 20 fatalities, i forget the exact year -- to get to zero

fatalities. are we on track? marta: the city has made progress. but it is not moving fast enough. they are doing many of the right things but not enough of them at the scale needed to get a handle on this. again, i do think we face a growing threat. and so i hope, out of all of this suffering, awareness and attitude about change can come out of it. kristen: marta lindsey, no doubt this will get a lot of people's attention and have that conversation be put to the front burner. thank you so much for your time. my colleague luz pena will have more at 4:30 today. as hawaii continues to add up losses due to the devastating wildfires, people there are relying on the nation's rich culture and tradition of love. ahead, an ethnic studies professor and author will

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kristen: you might have seen social media posts and interviews in which survivors of the maui wildfires are telling tourists not to come. jason momoa has posted several messages like this one that they do not travel to maui. but beneath that statement is a deep current of hurt and anger, bred by the colonial history of hawaii. joining us to help us better understand the history and current tensions, uc berkeley ethnic studies professor bernadette, author of the book

tourism and militarism in hawaii and the philippines. professor gonzales, thank you for joining us. i think we all understand the sentiment do not come right now. you will get in the way of recovery workers. but it seems for some in hawaii, especially those with native hawaiian blood, their don't come runs deeper than that. can you explain? >> we have to understand tourism as something that does not exist on its own. its shape today is deeply beholden to historical and ongoing native hawaiian disposition. the continuing villagers asian of its lands and to that of extraction and ownership. so, a lot of this resentment and distrust that you are hearing in social media is coming from a very fraught history that is basically a history of u.s.-backed regime change.

an overthrow of a sovereign monarch in 1893 that was driven by broader kristen: at the time sugar was the industry, not tourism. it had to do with taxes and the benefits of hiving hawaii -- having hawaii as a territory. having that strategic place in the middle of the pacific. so you are right, there was a whole lot. then it became a territory. when did it become a state and what was the sentiment of native hawaiians through all of this? vernadette: distrust. what we see in the vote for statehood, which everyone who was a citizen of the territory could vote for, it gave no options for autonomy. so this is happening in a

post-world war ii, cold war era. so you would either vote for statehood, or there was no opt out, no alternative. so there was never a way to politically imagine something different. and so, that became yet another kind of maneuver really for what you see as a long process of dispossession of native people. kristen: so when there is not a sense that you have autonomy, that can breed those feelings of resentment. i also want to point out that lahaina in particular is a very sacred place to natives, isn't it? we refer to it as a popular tourist town, but it is more than that. vernadette: absolutely. it is a historical capital of the hawaiian kingdom. there was so much lost there in terms of cultural objects and

not just loss of life and loss of livelihoods and homes. it's really kind of compounded. so, to are seeing lahaina talked about in tourist terms only, it is also doubly hurtful. because this is a place that has been defined by tourism, because tourism has been one of the mainstays of the economy. and that is not necessarily by choice. that is because folks have not come up with different kinds of alternatives. i think people are always trying, but once the entrenchment of tourism happens, it's really difficult to come up with other kinds of things, despite the fact that tourism is a very volatile industry. kristen: that is why there is this love-hate relationship. i also want to ask you, even if that was not your desired industry and even if there were inequalities you don't love, if everybody there noe was taken care of, lived well, had homes,

had the resources they need, perhaps those feelings would not be as strong. but what is the reality of what people are dealing with, even as tourists come and enjoy their luxury vacations? vernadette: it is a deeply inequitable kind of landscape. in maui, about four out of five dollars are generated through visitor industry. many of its residents are employed in tourism or tourism-adjacent occupations, but mostly service jobs. you have folks not earning a lot of money. the landscape of maui itself is shaped by tourism. you see gated communities and golf courses linked to luxury hotels, and all these kind of investments in these kind of visitor-centric industries drive up land and housing costs for local residents who are priced out of paradise. we see the jeff bezos's, oprah winfreys, who are the famous celebrity folks were able to buy hundreds of acres of land.

most folks cannot. the folks you are seeing whose homes burned down are only really able to stay in maui or lahaina because they are living in multigenerational homes that have been in their families for many decades. and so most folks don't earn enough to buy housing in what is one of the highest priced real estate markets in the world. kristen: and there is real fear, i understand, that in the rebuilding process, there are predatory investors trying to buy the land. who knows if they will be able to afford what is rebuilt. what about water? you mentioned golf courses. i understand there have been battles over water and how it is allocated. vernadette: yeah. this is not a recent thing, this has been going on for a while. partially because of the way in which the land in hawaii has been taken over by large agribusiness. so there's been water theft, water redistribution. well not redistribution in a

good way. so there's been a battle over water, and you are seeing that play out in the kinds of mono cropping industries that have dominated maui. so you're seeing ranching, you're seeing sugar, you're seeing pineapple. all of these things have basically created a lot of environmental degradation, which is why you are seeing the kind of savannah-like conditions that have exacerbated the fire. kristen: can i ask you then what you think government policy needs to become to level the playing field and take away some of that resentment? which is very based. vernadette: i think you are seeing it now in terms of a possible model going forward. there is a great deal of distrust about the government response. because in the past, what you've seen is a pattern of government

policy that has actually removed autonomy away from people. and so, if you're looking at community-driven decisions, decision-making, that's the way to go. and you are seeing that in the kind of on the ground response to the triage response. it's community-driven, it's family-drive. you are seeing sort of a rejection of fema efforts even. a lot of critiques about the state response. it is really about people looking out for each other and centering and understanding that in order to build a community that is sustainable going forward, that they will have to depend on each other and de-center tourism development in the conversation for rebuilding. kristen: we have about 20 seconds but i want to ask, how

can we be good houseguests, how can we be good tourists that hawaiians would want to have an welcome? vernadette: right now, don't come. don't come. if you are planning to come, donate your money and said. hawaii peoples fund is a very trusted organization that will direct donations to the maui relief effort. that is what i would say. kristen: vernadette gonazalez, thank you so much. really appreciate your insights. thank you. if you like to help with the maui wildfire relief efforts, you can make a $10 donation to the red cross by texting red cross to 90999 or call 1-800-red-cross. air pollution is not just bad for your lungs. a new study says it is bad for your brain. the study's authors will join us to show us how we can red

kristen: and another health

issue to the link of diseases -- almost every organ in the body can be impacted by air pollution. a new study says that includes the brain. joining us live now is research fellow at the university of michigan and author of the study. thank you for joining us. >> thanks for having me. kristen: your study was published this week in the journal jama internal medicine, and it links air pollution to dementia. that got our attention. explain what you learned here. >> yes. so, like you said, air impacts our health and we have known for a long time for cardiovascular disease, our lungs, or even our mortality. but we are just beginning to know its impact on our cognitive health and dementia. more about why the source of air

pollution has been more toxic to our brains than others. we found that there are indeed some sources that are especially important for our brain, including agriculture and welfares. kristen: that is a bad development, because we are seeing more wildfires these days, certainly here in the western u.s. and 1 global climate change, that could become -- and with global climate change, that could become more of a thing. what can we do about that except i guess try and limit air pollution? >> yes. just as you said, big what we all need to do is slow down the pace of climate change which is part of the reason of the welfare events and also -- this needs global action.

at the individual level may be what we can do is, when there are smoking days, we can stay inside our home and do not go out to have access and use an air purifier. if you have to go can wear a mask to protect yourself, just like what we have done during covid. kristen: can i just ask you how you notice the dimension? what did you look at to determine there was this link between air pollution and dementia, and what were you looking at? boya: retirement study which includes about 30,000 participants across the u.s. all the participants are older than 50 years old. among them, we measured their

air pollution exposure and cognitive functions. we used models to find is a connection. kristen: what are the pollution levels you needed to be at to have an impact on dementia? are we talking about really high pollution levels or even levels the government does not caution you about? boya: unfortunately, currently we do not have a clear threshold for this exposure risk. the epa indeed has for long-term air pollution exposure. the standard is 12 per cubic meter in the u.s. the exposure level

is 11. which means the average exposure is even lower than the current standard. kristen: that is a little disconcerting, because you may need to take precautionary measures even when people are not sounding the alarm. real quickly before we go, what is next for your research? boya: to learn more about th link between air pollution and dementia, to learn more about the mechanism. we to other cultures like in europe or india. because we have a sister study in other countries around the world. kristen: boya zhang, thank you so much for coming on to share the results of your study in regards to air pollution and dementia.

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kristen: thank you so much for joining. tonight, breaking news as we come on the air. the faa on the scare in the air over houston. the flames shooting from a passenger jet. also, another flight from miami. one of the pilots dying mid-flight. also breaking news involving former president trump and georgia. what the sheriff is now saying. how this will look very different. and the stunning video from maui tonight. did this play a role in how the fires started?